The Logistics

Wanted: Dead Or Alive

Global Impact

A Post-Pablo Economy

Test Your Knowledge

The Syndicate

The Medellín Cartel was an empire of stunning sweep and unimaginable violence. At its height, it earned as much as $4 billion a year—most of it cash—for its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake.

Pablo Escobar and his partners called their business a cartel, but instead of controlling price and supply, it behaved far more like a criminal syndicate that pumped an endless supply of cocaine into the market and let the market set the price. It was not only a lethal purveyor of stimulants and mayhem, it was also a brilliant business, no different in many ways from a Fortune 500 corporation, but built to operate wholly outside the law.

“What the Medellín cartel did is exactly what any global pharmaceutical firm has to do,” says Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who fought the drug cartels as a deputy U.S. attorney general in the mid-1990s. “You start with an ordinary manufacturing and sales business, and then you overlay it with three other things to make up for the fact that you are working outside the legal system.”

That first element was fierce, almost irrational, loyalty to the syndicate’s leaders, especially Escobar. The loyalty, often laced with violence, replaced the courts that a legal corporation would use to enforce contracts. Escobar was a master at wielding loyalty to get what he wanted. “Escobar was the CEO, very charismatic, very powerful, very demanding,” says former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officer Javier Peña. He tracked Escobar from 1988 until the trafficker’s death in 1993. “He was considered a Robin Hood in Colombia.”

Escobar rallied support among Colombia’s poorest citizens by stepping in where the government couldn’t or wouldn’t. He built an apartment complex in a neighborhood of Medellín that still bears his name, where even today people praise him for what he did for their families and community. “There were tugurios [slums], what we call houses of cardboard and wood,” remembers Iván Hernández, a community leader in the Barrio Pablo Escobar. Escobar paid to build hundreds of homes in the impoverished area that had previously been a vast garbage dump. “While he was alive, everyone respected him, everybody managed themselves well in the neighborhoods and comunas.”

Violence was a masterful substitution for the merger and acquisition tactics of legitimate businesses. Anyone who crossed Escobar, even fellow cartel members, was killed by his legion of sicarios, hired guns as young as 14, plucked straight from the hellish ghettos of Medellín. He paid them $100 to $3,000 to kill Colombian cops—a huge amount of money in a city where kids from the slums had few options.

Peña remembers sicarios telling him, “Our life expectancy is 22. If we have some money to give to our mama, some money for sneakers and drinking, what else do we want?”

Cartel member José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha built the cartel’s military arm, hiring British and Israeli mercenaries to train his men, and uniting with right-wing death squads and paramilitary groups battling Colombia’s leftist guerillas.

Plata o Plomo

Finally, the Medellín organization used vast amounts of money to bribe law enforcement and government officials. The bribes were the criminal equivalent of legitimate businesses hiring lobbyists and paying regulatory fines. Although it meant handing over “a very sizeable share of their income” in bribes, Heymann says, it was simply a line item on the cartel’s profit and loss statement. Of course, the bribes came with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Escobar’s challenge, oft repeated, was simple: “Plata o plomo” (literally, “silver or lead,” as in, “take a bribe or take a bullet to the head”).

Loyalty, violence, bribery: For two decades, that lethal mix gave the Medellín syndicate a stranglehold on nearly every aspect of the global cocaine trade, from coca farms in Colombia to street dealers in Chicago. The deft use of those tactics made the Medellín syndicate the world’s most ruthless, violent and financially successful criminal organization before it withdrew into the shadows following Escobar’s death in 1993. In Colombia, a limited version of the business model lived on for another couple of decades through the Oficina de Envigado, whose members included surviving Medellín traffickers and some of Escobar’s former associates, and the Urabeños, the largest surviving criminal organization in Colombia. Pressured by Colombia’s police and U.S. law enforcement, today’s Medellín traffickers form smaller, looser organizations with less control of their markets and no visible kingpins, while keeping a lower profile as they move cocaine around the world and develop a thriving market in Brazil and Argentina. The business model has thrived where the state is weak and police corrupt, most notably with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

The
Ever-Changing
Logistics of
Drug Smuggling

By Peter S. Green

If Escobar was the syndicate’s charismatic CEO, his cousin Gustavo Gaviria Rivero was its chief operating officer and the “brains of the cartel,” Peña says. Gaviria Rivero developed and controlled the cartel’s key smuggling routes—what would be called logistics in the legitimate world of moving goods around the world.

Until the late 1970s, cocaine entered the United States mainly in small quantities stuffed into suitcase linings on commercial flights or smuggled via small boats and fishing trawlers. But as cocaine became the disco era’s drug of choice and Wall Street’s drug of power in the 1980s, ever-larger quantities were required to meet a seemingly insatiable demand.

Drug Routes Through the Decades

1960s

In the 1960s, Colombia wasn’t yet a major player in the global cocaine trade. While cocaine was shipped along with marijuana (the more popular export at the time), the decade belonged to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

1970s

The market moved north to Colombia in 1973, and Pablo Escobar seized the opportunity to corner the expanding U.S. market. By 1975, the country was exporting 4,000 kilograms of cocaine to the U.S. a year.

1980s

At its height, the Medellín Cartel supplied up to 80 percent of the global cocaine market, running its product up through the Caribbean. In 1978, cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder started buying up property on Norman’s Cay, a small island in the Bahamas, which in the early 80s became a key stopover where drug planes could refuel en route to the United States.

1990s

After Escobar’s death, the implosion of the Medellín Cartel opened the field up for new players. Mexican powers like the Sinaloa Cartel became specialists in moving cocaine into the U.S. by land. By the end of the decade, 80 percent of the cocaine bound for the country entered through Mexico.

2000s

While cocaine sales waned in the U.S., Europe emerged as a new and powerful market. Cartels imported through Spain by way of West Africa—operations that have had disastrous repercussions for the region.

Location Highlight
Boat Route
Plane Route
Truck Route

Escobar, who started out as a car thief, then small-time trafficker and kidnapper, first saw opportunity in feeding America’s cocaine habit by smuggling coca paste into Colombia, refining it and paying “mules” to smuggle it into the U.S. in their luggage or by swallowing condoms stuffed with cocaine.

Escobar shipped much of the cartel’s cocaine through the Caribbean, working with Carlos Lehder and George Jung, who were organizing flights into South Florida through the Bahamas. Lehder then broke with Jung and took control of the tiny Bahamian island of Norman’s Cay in 1979, using it as a base where planes would land in broad daylight on the 3,300-foot-long airstrip with loads of cocaine from Colombia. The cocaine was transferred to small planes that could fly below U.S. radar and land on dirt roads and berms in Florida’s Everglades.

Such out-in-the-open smuggling wasn’t going to last long. In 1982, the Bahamian government forced the traffickers off Norman’s Cay. The South Florida Drug Task Force, a combination of agents from the DEA, Customs, FBI and other government agencies along with the military, brought a screeching halt to the Colombia-Bahama-Florida route.

But Gaviria Rivero simply shifted the Medellín supply chain. He tapped legitimate cargo shipments, replacing the insulation in refrigerators and insides of TV sets from Panama with cocaine. They also mixed the highly soluble drug into Guatemalan fruit pulp, Ecuadorian cocoa, Chilean wine and Peruvian dried fish—even soaked it into blue jeans—which was removed by chemists upon arrival in the United States.

From Plant To Powder

The Medellín syndicate was involved in every part of the drug trade, from coca farms in Colombia to street dealers in the United States.

In the 1980s, a kilo of cocaine might cost $1,000 to refine, but Escobar’s agents could sell it for up to $70,000 in the U.S.

He began moving cocaine through poverty-stricken Haiti instead of the tourist enclaves of the Bahamas. Profits were so big, pilots made one-way trips to the Florida coast, dropping sacks of cocaine, ditching their planes in the sea and then swimming to waiting ships.

The cartel also began moving cocaine through Panama. From there Mexican couriers would take it overland through Mexico and across the border into the U.S. That meant befriending Mexican smugglers, which helped launch the Sinaloa, Juárez and Tampico cartels that have since turned Mexico into a virtual narco-state.

Throughout it all, the Medellín syndicate remained a decidedly wholesale organization. Escobar and his partners used a collection of distributors and retailers, from U.S. organized crime groups to small-town drug barons and Colombian émigrés, to control the majority of the cocaine moving through Southern Florida and over the Mexican border to the streets of America.

The distributors effectively became “franchisees” of the Colombians, says Paul Gootenberg, a historian and SUNY distinguished professor at Stony Brook University in New York. Violence, bribes and loyalty helped the Medellín syndicate control them. In fact, just the promise of violent retribution from Escobar’s enforcers if they didn’t pay for deliveries made it possible for the syndicate to control the retail side of the drug trade thousands of miles from home.

Even if they had to share the final profits, the riches were vast. A kilo of cocaine might cost $1,000 to refine and up to $4,000 to smuggle to Miami, where Escobar’s agents could sell it for $50,000 to $70,000 in the mid-1980s. At its peak, the Medellín syndicate had five to seven flights a day into the U.S., Mexico or the Caribbean, each carrying some 500 kilos of dope, say Peña and his DEA partner at the time, Steve Murphy. Tons of cocaine became billions in profits.

Wanted:Dead or Alive

By Peter S. Green

As cocaine use morphed into an epidemic in the early 1980s, and cheap, toxic crack cocaine ravaged America’s inner cities, the U.S. stepped up its war on drugs. When seizures of tons of cocaine in the U.S. failed to dent the supply, the U.S. increased pressure on Colombia to capture the drug kingpins and extradite them for trial in the U.S. Escobar made a bold, and in the end foolhardy, effort to fight the U.S. extradition.

Still known locally as a successful and generous businessman, Escobar co-opted the venerable Liberal Party, and won a seat in parliament in 1982 as an alternate representative, where he pressured legislators to renounce a 1979 extradition treaty with the U.S. and funded a campaign to build opposition to extradition. A year later, crusading Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla exposed Escobar as a drug baron, forcing him out of parliament and vowing to bring the Medellín Cartel to justice.

Lara Bonilla would pay for his heroic act with his life. On April 30, 1984, gunmen on a motorcycle ambushed the minister’s government limousine, killing him. Escobar was blamed for the assassination, but wasn’t convicted. President Belisario Betancur declared war on the drug traffickers, and for the next decade, Colombia was consumed with violence as Escobar, the government, and leftist militias and right-wing death squads fought each other—the country’s decades-long civil war stretching beyond politics to control of the increasingly lucrative drug trade.

Facing extradition to the U.S. on drug charges, Escobar vowed never to surrender, telling a meeting of traffickers: “I would rather have a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the U.S.”

The cartel took on Colombia, killing Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jiménez in a kidnapping attempt near Medellín in January 1988. A few months later, the DEA sent Peña to Colombia to help capture Escobar and extradite him to the U.S. The traffickers struck again and again, blowing up a Colombian airliner in November 1989 and the headquarters of Colombia’s intelligence agency, the DAS, a month later. A special police team, the Bloque de Búsqueda (the Search Bloc), was formed to bring in Escobar.

Pressured by police, rival traffickers and a potent militia called the PEPES (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), Escobar negotiated his own surrender in 1991 to a luxury prison he designed and built near his home in Medellín. But a year later, Escobar escaped from the prison as authorities arrived to move him to a secure jail near Bogota.

Death Rate Rising

Violence spread across Colombia in the early 1990s, with the murder toll topping 28,000 deaths in a single year.

The Search Bloc was reactivated, and Peña and Murphy were sent to Medellín to join the hunt for Escobar. Within days, they had a $300,000 price on their heads. “We were aware of that, but we didn’t think about that; it simply doesn’t interfere with the way you’re going to do business,” Murphy says almost without emotion more than 20 years later. The murder toll in Colombia surged, peaking that year at over 28,000 across the country, with 7,081 in Medellín alone (almost 10 times the number in 1980).

The bounty on Peña and Murphy was the stuff of dreams for the ghetto-born hitmen who were paid a fraction of that sum to kill Colombian cops. To keep out of the sicarios’ gunsights, Murphy and Peña were not allowed out on their own in Medellín. They lived with the police unit hunting Escobar in a converted school surrounded by barbed wire fences and patrolled by perimeter guards. If they left the base, an elite corps of bodyguards surrounded them. To get to Medellín from the airport, they were often flown by Colombian police in Huey helicopter gunships.

But just as legal corporations find the roots of their failure in their very success, the violence that Escobar wielded eventually led to his downfall and death. Escobar’s obsession with killing his enemies—and increasingly, innocent people—would be his downfall. The murder of two allies turned fellow traffickers against him. The Search Bloc and the PEPES were gradually arresting or killing his trusted aides, and the government pressured Escobar’s family. With a bounty of more than $5 million on Escobar’s head, tips poured into a police hotline in Medellín.

“What killed the Medellín cartel was clearly the strong violence,” says Thomas Pietschmann, a researcher at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. “Violence was never good for business, and Pablo Escobar clearly overdid it. He no longer took the precautionary measures you would do as a drug trafficker.”

A day after his 44th birthday, he lingered too long talking to his son on a mobile phone, allowing a Colombian police lieutenant, Hugo Martinez, whose father led the Search Bloc, to trace him to a three-story house in Medellín. He was cornered by several hundred police and shot dead as he leapt to a rooftop on December 2, 1993. In the minutes after his death, Colombian commandos posed like big game hunters over Escobar’s corpse. “Viva Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!” a Colombian policeman shouted over his radio as he broke the news.

The Global Impact of the Cocaine Trade

By Mack Gelber

Mexico

Ciudad Juárez

Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Juárez, a Mexican border city of about 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Until recently, violence was a fact of life for most of its citizens, for whom public shootouts and piles of mutilated corpses (messages of retribution from one cartel to another) were part of everyday life.

In fact, even a decline in the murder rate is being attributed to the fluctuations of the drug economy, for which Juárez remains a critical gateway to the world’s biggest drug market—the United States.

In 2010, 3,000 people were killed in Juárez (an average of 8.5 people per day), but in 2014 that number dropped sharply to just 434. But the decline isn’t being attributed to better police work or the escalation of army troops by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón. Instead, even U.S. authorities see it as a side effect of how Juárez remains in thrall to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appears to have won the city’s drug trade away from the rival Juárez cartel. The decline in deaths comes from one simple fact: The Sinaloa Cartel won the war.

With the decline in deaths, the tourism board has launched a campaign featuring the slogan “Juárez Is Waiting for You”—words that, just a few years ago, would have carried a sinister undercurrent. But whether tourists will be lured to Juárez remains to be seen. It’s a haunted place with gravestones and crosses lining the city streets and piles of rusty bullets easily discovered from old shoot-outs.

U.S.A.

Chicago

More than 1,500 miles north, Chicago is a major distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel-affiliated drug rings that move as much as 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month to meet U.S. demand. The organization controls an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics dealt in the area.

The Mexican cartels use the city’s location to their benefit. Chicago is within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. A total of six interstates crisscross the metropolitan area, and then there are the city’s ports on Lake Michigan and the rail lines that link it to both coasts.

The city’s ethnic makeup may also be making it easy for the Mexican and South American cartels to operate under the radar. Cartel operatives can be found in neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Little Village, according to county law enforcement, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic. Both also are close to two of the city’s main interstates.

While it’s hard to separate out the full impact of the cartels from the other violence that comes from gang activity and drug use, law enforcement in the Chicago areas say the drug trade likely has contributed to the violence in Little Village, which has been named one of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by Neighborhood Scout.

But the death and destruction the cocaine trade brings is very localized with few outside of the Little Village neighborhood understanding what it is like to live in an area that is home not only to drug cartels, according to law enforcement, but also violent gangs. If Juárez is haunted by its recent past, Little Village is haunted by the present. Residents impose their own curfews and lock down businesses on what should be busy Friday nights to guard against the violence that comes from being at the epicenter of gangs and drugs.

Sierra Leone

Freetown

Across the globe, Sierra Leone has become a major player in the European cocaine trade. That became apparent on Sunday, July 13, 2008, when around 3:30 a.m., a small plane touched down at Lungi International Airport near the country’s capital, Freetown. According to news reports, a fake Red Cross insignia was painted on the tail, along with the Venezuelan flag. Inside were five AK-47 rifles, 34 containers of aviation fuel and over 700 kilograms of cocaine, valued at nearly $100 million.

Even though thousands of miles of ocean separate Latin America from the West African coast, the country’s foreign minister has said in media reports that cartel operations are thriving as drug traffickers take advantage of Sierra Leone’s geographical position on the west coast of Africa to supply Europe’s growing cocaine market, often through the port city of Naples. They also capitalize on the country’s unstable government institutions, say drug enforcement officials.

The country’s geography and political instability have helped make the country popular for Mexican and South American drug cartels and has given rise to a cocaine abuse problem that the country had never faced before. Sierra Leone doesn’t produce cocaine locally, but local drug handlers are sometimes paid in product—a fact that may have contributed to the rise of cocaine use in West Africa. According to some estimates, up to 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally, and the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report draws a connection between the cocaine trade in South America to the growing abuse of the drug in Sierra Leone and other West African countries.

Italy

Naples

When Le Vele, the Le Corbusier-inspired housing project in Naples’ Scampìa neighborhood, was completed in 1975, its design was intended to suggest a billowing set of sails. That’s what the name means—Le Vele di Scampìa (The Sails of Scampìa)—and it spoke to idealism and optimism that has little to do with the place Le Vele has become.

Now reportedly a major hub for the Camorra, a loose-knit collective of crime syndicates operating in Naples, Le Vele’s high-rises are more a series of battlements keeping police activity at bay than sails of promise. The people who do live here (some legally, but most as squatters) share space with the local cocaine and heroin business that brings in more than $11 million a month to meet the demand for coke in Western Europe. The European drug trade, rooted in Latin America and shipped through West Africa, has turned these apartments into trenches, residents into co-conspirators and children into soldiers. Meanwhile, Camorra operatives in Latin America and Mexico broker deals with the region’s cartels, ensuring that the circuitous route between South America and Naples remains open.

The place’s devastation, both social and physical, can be read as a metaphor for the larger devastation of the cocaine trade on Naples. One feud over control of the Scampìa drug market left an estimated 140 dead in 2004. Hundreds of innocent bystanders have been killed by mistake by Camorra assassins since 1980 as well. A crackdown followed, but like the rot eating at the walls and floors of Le Vele, purging the project of cocaine won’t be easy.

Mexico

Ciudad Juárez

Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Juárez, a Mexican border city of about 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Until recently, violence was a fact of life for most of its citizens, for whom public shootouts and piles of mutilated corpses (messages of retribution from one cartel to another) were part of everyday life.

In fact, even a decline in the murder rate is being attributed to the fluctuations of the drug economy, for which Juárez remains a critical gateway to the world’s biggest drug market—the United States.

In 2010, 3,000 people were killed in Juárez (an average of 8.5 people per day), but in 2014 that number dropped sharply to just 434. But the decline isn’t being attributed to better police work or the escalation of army troops by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón. Instead, even U.S. authorities see it as a side effect of how Juárez remains in thrall to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appears to have won the city’s drug trade away from the rival Juárez cartel. The decline in deaths comes from one simple fact: The Sinaloa Cartel won the war.

With the decline in deaths, the tourism board has launched a campaign featuring the slogan “Juárez Is Waiting for You”—words that, just a few years ago, would have carried a sinister undercurrent. But whether tourists will be lured to Juárez remains to be seen. It’s a haunted place with gravestones and crosses lining the city streets and piles of rusty bullets easily discovered from old shoot-outs.

U.S.A.

Chicago

More than 1,500 miles north, Chicago is a major distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel-affiliated drug rings that move as much as 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month to meet U.S. demand. The organization controls an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics dealt in the area.

The Mexican cartels use the city’s location to their benefit. Chicago is within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. A total of six interstates crisscross the metropolitan area, and then there are the city’s ports on Lake Michigan and the rail lines that link it to both coasts.

The city’s ethnic makeup may also be making it easy for the Mexican and South American cartels to operate under the radar. Cartel operatives can be found in neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Little Village, according to county law enforcement, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic. Both also are close to two of the city’s main interstates.

While it’s hard to separate out the full impact of the cartels from the other violence that comes from gang activity and drug use, law enforcement in the Chicago areas say the drug trade likely has contributed to the violence in Little Village, which has been named one of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by Neighborhood Scout.

But the death and destruction the cocaine trade brings is very localized with few outside of the Little Village neighborhood understanding what it is like to live in an area that is home not only to drug cartels, according to law enforcement, but also violent gangs. If Juárez is haunted by its recent past, Little Village is haunted by the present. Residents impose their own curfews and lock down businesses on what should be busy Friday nights to guard against the violence that comes from being at the epicenter of gangs and drugs.

Sierra Leone

Freetown

Across the globe, Sierra Leone has become a major player in the European cocaine trade. That became apparent on Sunday, July 13, 2008, when around 3:30 a.m., a small plane touched down at Lungi International Airport near the country’s capital, Freetown. According to news reports, a fake Red Cross insignia was painted on the tail, along with the Venezuelan flag. Inside were five AK-47 rifles, 34 containers of aviation fuel and over 700 kilograms of cocaine, valued at nearly $100 million.

Even though thousands of miles of ocean separate Latin America from the West African coast, the country’s foreign minister has said in media reports that cartel operations are thriving as drug traffickers take advantage of Sierra Leone’s geographical position on the west coast of Africa to supply Europe’s growing cocaine market, often through the port city of Naples. They also capitalize on the country’s unstable government institutions, say drug enforcement officials.

The country’s geography and political instability have helped make the country popular for Mexican and South American drug cartels and has given rise to a cocaine abuse problem that the country had never faced before. Sierra Leone doesn’t produce cocaine locally, but local drug handlers are sometimes paid in product—a fact that may have contributed to the rise of cocaine use in West Africa. According to some estimates, up to 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally, and the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report draws a connection between the cocaine trade in South America to the growing abuse of the drug in Sierra Leone and other West African countries.

Italy

Naples

When Le Vele, the Le Corbusier-inspired housing project in Naples’ Scampìa neighborhood, was completed in 1975, its design was intended to suggest a billowing set of sails. That’s what the name means—Le Vele di Scampìa (The Sails of Scampìa)—and it spoke to idealism and optimism that has little to do with the place Le Vele has become.

Now reportedly a major hub for the Camorra, a loose-knit collective of crime syndicates operating in Naples, Le Vele’s high-rises are more a series of battlements keeping police activity at bay than sails of promise. The people who do live here (some legally, but most as squatters) share space with the local cocaine and heroin business that brings in more than $11 million a month to meet the demand for coke in Western Europe. The European drug trade, rooted in Latin America and shipped through West Africa, has turned these apartments into trenches, residents into co-conspirators and children into soldiers. Meanwhile, Camorra operatives in Latin America and Mexico broker deals with the region’s cartels, ensuring that the circuitous route between South America and Naples remains open.

The place’s devastation, both social and physical, can be read as a metaphor for the larger devastation of the cocaine trade on Naples. One feud over control of the Scampìa drug market left an estimated 140 dead in 2004. Hundreds of innocent bystanders have been killed by mistake by Camorra assassins since 1980 as well. A crackdown followed, but like the rot eating at the walls and floors of Le Vele, purging the project of cocaine won’t be easy.

The Global Impact of the Cartels

By Mack Gelber

Cocaine still flows through the Medellín Cartel’s distribution networks. The routes feed demand for the drug and are paved with death, decay and destruction.

Cartels and their associates are so profitable that they can afford sophisticated weapons and equipment, including night-vision goggles, to aid in trafficking operations.

3 of 8

Strict drug laws resulting in high incarceration rates have translated into massive profits for private prisons, with some companies reaping billions of dollars in revenues.

4 of 8

Drug money funds the construction of the lavish homes favored by the narco-elite, replete with underground pools, enclosures for exotic animals and replicas of famous paintings by modern masters.

5 of 8

Aerospace companies have made hundreds of millions of dollars manufacturing helicopters used to combat Colombian drug cartels. Last year, the Mexican military signed a deal to spend $680 million on American-made helicopters to be used in anti-trafficking operations.

6 of 8

Profits from the cocaine trade helped keep some U.S. and European banks in business during the recession of the late 2000s. Several large banks have been found guilty of or investigated for allowing traffickers to launder money using their services.

7 of 8

U.S. government agencies have spent hundreds of millions to revamp their computer systems in an effort to gain further insight into the financial crimes of drug cartels. Voice recognition technology was critical to the arrest of one Colombian cartel leader.

8 of 8

The private security sector has seen a hiring uptick in Central America, particularly in the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador), where drug trafficking is highly concentrated.

Prev
Next

Who Else Profits from the Drug War?

By Mack Gelber

From private prisons to plastic surgery, legitimate industries have benefited from the fight against drug traffickers.

click to view

2015

Medellín:A Post-Pablo Economy By Fara Warner and Christine Sanders

By Fara Warner and Christine Sanders

Medellín is a study in contrasts. Visit the El Poblado comuna (or neighborhood), and the city feels worthy of the “miracle” moniker that’s been applied to its comeback economy.

High-rise apartments punctuate the sky. Open-air restaurants are filled with people—an unimaginable scene when gunfights between Pablo Escobar’s sicarios and government forces meant sitting outside was a potential death sentence. The Museo de Antioquia rivals any in the world and features more than 188 works by one of Medellín’s other famous citizens—sculptor and painter Fernando Botero.

The Miracle of Medellín

After decades of violence, Medellín has become one of South America’s most dynamic cities.

Go beyond the upscale El Poblado and the other Medellín—the noise, pollution and chaos of the more notorious comunas—begins to reveal itself.

Poverty, crime and income inequality—systemic problems in the city before cocaine was added to the mix—are still prevalent. Neighborhoods such as Comuna 13 and Comuna 9 are made up of ramshackle houses with tin roofs and stucco-covered brick perched on the steep hills. Here, Medellín’s economic comeback feels more elusive. The divide between rich and poor is higher here than the rest of Colombia as defined by the Gini coefficient, which represents income distribution. The lower the Gini number, the more economically equal a society is considered to be. Medellín’s Gini number has dropped from .54 to .50 from 2008 to 2012. Colombia’s average is .49. By comparison, the United States’ Gini number was .41 in 2013.

But stop. Listen closely. You’ll hear the distinctive sounds of Spanish-laced hip-hop emanating from Casa Kolacho in Comuna 13. Turn a corner and you’ll be met with the riotous beauty of graffiti that has become the community’s defiant symbol of rebirth. You begin to see why Medellín is a model for other cities trying to put their violent pasts behind them. It’s one of the very few cities torn apart by narco-terrorism to make a comeback.

The local government has begun to contribute to revitalizing neighborhoods where once the illegal economy of drugs and crime were the only ways out of the slums—or at least the only way to make money. An escalator has been built to connect the people at the top of the steep hill with those at the bottom, in an effort to bridge the city’s topography.

“I don’t want a segregated city that is not one city but 15 different cities,” says Medellín’s mayor Aníbal Gaviria Correa. “Communities and neighborhoods where the quality of life and security are much worse than others.”

He admits that while Medellín has come a long way from the violent, decimated city it was in the 1990s, “there is so much left to do, despite today having historically lower levels of both extreme poverty and violence.” The city’s murder rate has dropped from 381 per 100,000 in 1991 (almost 40 times higher than the U.N.’s marker for an epidemic of violence), to less than 27 per 100,000 in 2014. That is lower than U.S. cities such as Baltimore, Maryland.

But the deep economic divide that the Medellín Cartel capitalized on still exists. For the city’s poorest residents, the illegal economy—the economy of drugs in particular—was and still is a way to rise up and out of extreme poverty.

The intensity of the crisis and the sheer number of people killed in the violence has shaken Medellín to its core. And while no one would want any city to go through what Medellín did, the horrific crisis here has forced the government and social institutions to be more creative in their efforts to bring the city back.

The local government has invested in traditional ways, with money for the escalators, schools, roads and other public works. But it may be the government’s willingness to accept that acts of seeming defiance like graffiti and hip-hop are in fact acts of economic power that will move the city forward.

“The movement to make art a part of culture and creating spaces for dance, to sing, to do graffiti and more has given rise to youth engaging in such activities,” says Chota, a graffiti artist who goes by a single name. But unlike graffiti artists elsewhere who learned their craft under threat of arrest for defacing property, Chota was actually schooled in the art of graffiti. “When I was in 11th grade, the opportunity to participate in art programs was provided. Because I liked drawing, I became involved with graffiti and fine-tuned my techniques,” he says.

One of his murals, called America and representative of South America as opposed to North America, features a face where the neck is made of leaves, the hair is painted to represent weeds and a lotus flower defines the crown of the head.

“Art has become something that has helped communities resist violence,” he says. “But it is also a way for the city itself to gain a different reputation away from being a dangerous and violent place to a place where young people can have a prosperous outlook of the future.”

In Comuna 13, hip-hop can provide a path to that future and may protect young people from getting involved in gangs. The irony is that the community has embraced a musical form that is defiant, anti-establishment and born out of despair—and often comes from the very place, the United States, that provided the market for cocaine. Here it is the music of hope. “We work with kids who have never been involved in gang violence,” says Jeihhco, a hip-hop artist who helped start Casa Kolacho. “These are kids who are living surrounded by violence, but have been fortunate enough not to be living it. We have become an option here in Medellín. Violence is still rampant. Gangs still exist, stronger than ever. Fortunately, we’re also stronger than ever.”

SHARE

Are you an expert in

Pablo Escobar was a complicated character—a ruthless criminal but also a cunning business entrepreneur. His ability to outthink his competition and deflect attempts to bring him to justice set him apart. Could you have stayed one step ahead like Escobar?